Navigating Corporate Leadership and Political Ideologies | TSG Ep. 901

Sh be very quiet. I'm hunting CEOs, they're endangered. You know, you're watching Text on Gang.

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel. It's Wednesday. And no, that was a little Elmer fud, but hey, CEOs are becoming an endangered species.

Again. You know, when things get tight, you see this happen, right? The boys at the top who've been collecting the big bucks all of a sudden, and unfortunately it is usually boys.

Um, but all of a sudden the screws get tightened and off they go. Of course, you know, don't cry for them. They all have golden parachutes usually that they're jumping out into.

So there we are. Anyway, we, we have an interesting gang here for you this Wednesday. We've got some of my favorite people on the gang.

Let me quickly introduce them to you. We have Chris Blak, Kate Scarsella, Mitch Ashley, and of course the Dean, Mike Ard. Mike, what do we got?

Well, starting with the CEO conversation, the CEO of GitHub has decided to call it a day and is leaving the company, and allegedly he's gonna go back to creating additional startups. And, but the more interesting thing to me was that GitHub is essentially gonna get pulled back into the mothership in Microsoft and become more of a mainstream element of their application development strategy. Um, Mitch, I mean, I think a lot of us expected this to happen a while ago, but the question is here, uh, what's your take on it?

And B, will the rest of the open source community kind of take this as an opportunity maybe to have a referendum on whether they will still trust Microsoft as an open source company? Well, It cer it certainly could have that consequence. Um, if GitHub loses its sort of acumen and, and mantra with the open developer community, both open source and just being a platform for everybody to use, I don't think that's gonna be the part that's gonna significantly change.

This is, this is a sign of AI is not only coming for your job, whether you're a CEO or anybody, it's coming for your strategy. And this is a realignment of strategy tying directly into core ai, which is the group that runs is, is in charge of all AI for Microsoft. And while they didn't hint at this, at their, at their BUILD conference, you could see that at the elevation of core ai, uh, taking on more and more, they didn't hint anything about GitHub.

But the time is right. You know, CEOs leave for a couple of reasons. One, financial performance is bad, or strategy change, or somebody just doesn't like 'em, right?

So new chairman doesn't like him, whatever it might be. Um, so this is clearly a realignment of strategy. So I don't, I don't think Microsoft will go in and clean out and just change all of what's happening.

GitHub, I'm also not naive enough to say they're gonna leave it all alone. I think they're gonna get much tighter connected into the AI strategy of what GitHub is doing and what Microsoft is doing, because there is sort of this uncomfortable distance between the two that has existed so far. You know, is it GitHub actions and Microsoft vs code, and where's the AI part of it?

You know, it's, it's a little murky, and I think this will help clarify that. Hmm. Well, I I would characterize it as this resistance is futile as the Borg saying, you know, Mitch reasons, the CEO leaves their stock option grant is finished.

They don't like being part of the big corporate culture, the startup people, open source people who are chafing under the, you know, the big corporate thing. And I, I think that might be the case here. I I do think that, um, the CEO is, uh, as Mike said, look, we are expecting this to happen a lot sooner than it did.

But I think you also, let's give him some credit, right? Um, you know, and if I mispronounce Thomas, it's Thomas Donkey, right? Or, or dunk.

Yeah, it's donkey. You know, look, he took a company here, GI GitHub. When Microsoft first bought it, it was a repository you gave, you gave software stars if you liked it, you voted for the software you liked, but it was an open source repo.

And then, you know, they, they allowed you to maybe create your own on-prem version of it. But when Microsoft bought it, the idea was, oh my God, Microsoft already has a fantastic developer channel. They're strong in the developer world, but they just bought in, I think at the time it was 27,000, or excuse me, 27 million, something like that.

22 million, uh, developer accounts. And this is gonna make Microsoft the king of the developer hill. Well, a funny thing happened in the ensuing years.

GitHub went from being just a pure repo, if you will, to the place where, where the action is. GI Ops GitHubs, it became A-C-I-C-D solution. It became an IDE.

It became the place where copilot, which I never knew if it was Microsoft or GitHub, was copilot. To your point, Mitch, That's where it lived. I think for most developers, the the clippy thing that's going on in WordPress and Excel now is not the copilot that they have in GitHub.

So much more powerful, the GitHub copilot is, is, you know, a bit of a real deal compared to what we see in, in work. So, you know, I, I think Thomas job well done. Go back to your peeps, take your money, cash your options.

Satchi will keep growing this thing and make it more valuable for you and go build your next adventure, right? He's, he's leaving, he's leaving at the top of the mountain, right? He's not, he's not sneaking out in the middle of the night.

He, he's staying on for the next six, seven of five months, whatever, four months. Because, you know, he's, he's, he's leaving in triumph. That's a, that's a good way to go.

I think people will be closely watching GitHub actions in the age of AI and Microsoft. 'cause a lot of folks who do use it don't necessarily always drop everything on Azure, right? They're kind of using that as a, as a front end.

But if Microsoft starts, you know, thinks it's gonna optimize GitHub actions for Microsoft Azure, a lot of people may decide that those optimizations are maybe lock-ins. So to me, that's the thing that maybe I would keep the closest I am. I don't think Microsoft will be that heavy handed.

No. We, I think that Microsoft of old would've been, but yes, I think it's a concern, but I don't think they will either. Sorry, go ahead, Kate.

I stepped On you. No, I, I, but I, I do think that we see this slow erosion of GitHub's independent, um, spirit personally, I, I only because of the people who are putting into GitHub are going to other sources, is there's been a slow, um, you know, a slow leak of people going and looking at other places to put their code. So mm-hmm.

Chris, Yeah. And I, it, yeah, I think it's an interesting one because, you know, I, I, again, I'm not a real coder. I just play one on tv, right?

You know, so I had a GitHub, uh, account Chris Blak, uh, so far back and did so a little bit that I lost the password. So, and now Chris Blak won, right? But with this whole civic AI thing come Back to, Right?

But, but the, you know, and it's not because it's GitHub, you know, the Civic AI canon was all written in documents in Google Drive and so forth. But as you look at principle, where, where he put something like that, it needs to be, you know, a detestable repo kind of thing with version control. So it's MD documents, not executable code, but it's a fantastic repo.

It's replicable, you know, fork. There's Arabic translations. It's all the same, but it's not about GitHub.

It's about that type of strata. And so there's that side of it. And, you know, we've just finished the cisa sbo, you know, cycle that Alan Friedman's leading.

And the whole, you know, again, it's not just about, uh, Washington with the SBOs thing in the supply chain, is Brad an era of what's the next thing we do? And some of us are looking at that, you know, we've been involved in those working groups, having conversations, you know, in this era, you know, this month, the next month. And my thought is that I want working groups to use GitHub, um, to file all the documents and actually execute all of the, the, the programs.

You know, I would like to, to in supply chain, have a bunch of GitHub attestations, you know, that have all the terms and everything you need, you know, to actually exercise supply chain, uh, demonstrations at least. And in a lot of cases, I, you know, those sick, again, not about GitHub, but those sorts of capabilities are intrinsic for all these systems to coordinate with each other. So, yeah, I, you know, to our point, Microsoft taking over the co-pilot, um, as I was saying in the Green, green Room, the co-pilot attached to GitHub is a really fascinating little creature, what they does a corporation do with it.

I'm with you, good and bad, otherwise, we'll see. But I understand, I, I, I still go back to, and multiple things of course can be true at once. You know your point about what, what he stumped he's accomplished, Alan.

Um, but I, but the way I look at this is it is trench warfare for fight for the developer right now, because it isn't just Microsoft and AWS and Google. It's, it's all the small startups. It's the lovable, the, the cursors, the, the win wind serve.

And while the numbers aren't as big, the innovation from the model creators, I mean, they clearly know that the owning the developers is key to their strategy, whether you're anthropic or, or, uh, open ai. And they're not gonna give that up. So, so the field has widened for people that are fighting for mindshare of the developers in the world.

And I think Microsoft sees this, this is my opinion, they've not told me this. I think Microsoft sees this as we gotta get our act together to play at an even more aggressive layer level, not meaning being the Borg of Microsoft, being the developer friendly, open developer friendly, and really go after the development market because they could start to see some serious erosion to a significant advantage that they have right now. And no one else has the advantage that Microsoft has today.

Mm-hmm. Kate, you know, to Alan's point, and the CEO did some awesome things here, but I felt like one part of the job that was kind of left undone was just making GitHub and those repositories more secure. I, I feel like there's been an opportunity to maybe think about putting more of the DevSecOps motion around the repository.

We've talked about that in previous shows, but I felt like that was an opportunity missed. I 100%. Thank you for bringing that up, Mike.

That's a one, not only a wonderful point, but we know within, um, many of the, um, of, you know, GitHub, that there is vulnerabilities in code that we know about that we don't get rid of, that we just reuse over and over again. And this would've been a phenomenal time to do what we've been talking about with software de bloating, right? And getting rid of code that nobody uses anymore.

And, you know, quite frankly, isn't even needed. We have so much information. I mean, cybersecurity is not just, you know, one of the things that I talk about is that there's so much out there that we can't grasp, we can't get our arms around, which in itself is vulnerabilities that we have just open vulnerabilities.

So yes, I think that they totally have missed this, and I'm hoping that moving forward, that they will really, I, I hope it's, I hope it's not over with, I mean, I hope that they really take this on. That would be, that would be such a huge, um, a huge help for, for cybersecurity people. So thank you for the Go ahead, Chris.

Yeah, Alan, you're the host of, stop Me if I'm completely off topic here, but Right what you're saying, Kate, you know, I, as I, and we as Qwi looks at in the near future, we're looking at, you know, uh, adaptively configuring you, uh, software for devices on the fly, because these things all sort of line up. You know, we, you know, whether it's our devices are unusable because they are so packed with apps and settings that getting them to work ever and never touching 'em again is our only goal as technology. People having to help the rest of the folks.

And to your point, because it, they're doing a million things they don't need to do. They're full of bloat and security problems and everything else. And I think with, with AI and the, the speed and the, and the complexity, if we can do the supply chain end to end, if we can do some of the other things, then, for example, saying, here's the code base, here's everything on, on GitHub, you know, trying to stay in, in the theme, and I want this device to do these things this afternoon and put just that software on it, and actually do it, and stop saying, I'm gonna develop this stack and put it out there for seven years.

It's like, ah, no. Uh, yes, absolutely. I'll never forget, um, you know, being with IBM walking into a c, uh, CISOs and him, him saying, you know, cursing me out and him saying, you know, this can do so much, and I don't want it to do all these things.

I just want it to do X. Why do you do this to us? So to your point, Chris, yes.

I mean, wouldn't that be nice? I, I think I am hoping that cybersecurity becomes as easy as you walk into your home, you turn a lock, and that's it, that's what we need. And, uh, perhaps I'm delusional, but by golly, that's, you know, that's what I want in GitHub with, you know, going more into the Microsoft's, um, core ai.

Who knows. I mean, back to your point, Mike, I mean, you know, is it a lost opportunity? Well, maybe it's not lost yet.

No, I, I, I'll tell you something though. When you think about how big a honeypot GitHub is, right? With all that code up there and all those accounts, I don't think they've failed its security as, as security failures go, there's a lot worse out there.

Could it be better? Yeah, it could always be better. Could always be better.

But I, I don't view them as, as being, you know, a sieve, you know, leaky, a leaky sieve here from a security point of view, they've tried, you know, will it be better as part of the mothership? I hope so. We'll see.

But I, you know, again, to Thomas Donkey's legacy, I don't know if that's gonna stick to 'em, that, you know, that it was, they, they didn't take security seriously enough. Well, we gotta talk about the scale issue here. I just looked up the numbers.

They have four 20 million repositories. The GitHub supports, they support over a hundred million developers. So maybe opportunity lost, I, I Don't know if it's a hundred million developers or a hundred million developer.

Accounts. Accounts. That's developer accounts, yeah.

Is what it is. So saying missed opportunity, okay, yes. But that's an opportunity.

Solving it at a scale of 420 million repositories, and you could very easily p**s off your community, you know, especially developers when you start, you know, getting in the middle of their work. Um, and yes, we can make code safer, but I, I'm just arguing to say it's easy to say, it's much harder to do. 'cause at that kind of scale, it'd be different if I was running a repository of, you know, 2000 different repositories and, you know, a hundred, a hundred thousand developers or 10,000 developers, whatever, the scale's so large.

But, but I'm sorry, but can't we agree that there is, um, information out there that really is so old that we should just get rid of it? Yes. There's also glass, um, glass.

There's also, Yes, there's also, uh, file servers with files that have infections and, and stuff in it too. And we don't do anything about that either, Kate. So I, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do this, but at some point, um, you know, is, is it, is it really GitHub's responsibility to clean up all that code?

It's not their code, it's other people's code that they're hosting. They have done things to clean up their own repository, their own things that they offer with, they've now are offering some security tools as part of their GitHub actions. Um, so I, I just, I think declaring that part of failure and, and blaming GitHub for it, I could blame a lot of people for that failure.

I, I, I think you guys are onto something. I think what we really need is bring out your dead code day once a year. Everybody just Is just a mon python.

Python. It's like a mon python thing, huh? Witch.

It's not a French word, by the way, de bloat All, I don't know anyone who ever deletes anything code wise, but, um, exactly. Let's take a break. We're over time here.

We're gonna come back to our B block here, CEOs at OpenText. The next, the next trophy on the wall, you're watching techron Game, Discover Techron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Yes. We're continuing to talk about CEOs this time. This CEO of OpenText is out, um, gonna be replaced by a temporary interim CEO while they go look for a new one.

And the discussion that they seem to be having is, or the debate within the company is to what degree should they keep all these elements of OpenText that have been pulled together over the last few years, or start selling off some of these assets because maybe they're worth more independently than they are together. This is not the first time this conversation is being had on any company, Allen. But, um, is there anything in here as you look at all this that says, Hey, maybe they have a point, or is the former CEO Mark Baria who built all this stuff as both CEO and CTO?

Probably, right? 'cause everybody else is doing the same thing anyway. Yeah.

So first of all, you know, Mitch, to your point about why do CEOs leave, this is a classic one. Obviously, uh, change your strategy and philosophy from the board. They said, mark, thank you for your time.

I will tell you that, you know, I don't know how many of you out here are familiar with OpenText, but you're right, Mike, over the last 4, 5, 6 years, they've built quite the collection of, of, uh, bobbles software bubbles and SAS Bobs, they don't always all fit together nicely, but it, it, it is a, an an eclectic collection of, of assets. And some of them are more valuable and more profitable than others. But Mark himself, I had the chance, I believe, to interview him once.

He, he was a kind of unique guy because he wasn't, he was the CTO as much as he was the CEO. And that might be the reason why they have this collection, right? Because at the end of the day, he was as geeky as any of us.

And he was really, you know, he wasn't the business suit guy. He was the, he was the, the techie guy. Um, and I, you know, and I, we've worked full disclosure Techstrong's, worked with OpenText for many years.

I love working with the company. Generally, they're good people. They have so many different areas that they play in that you can really get lost within it.

However, I'll tell you the, in my mind, the real story here is ai, AI is a threat to some of their business lines. They need to go all in on AI to keep their pro their, their profit centers profitable. And my my thought was maybe they, the board felt Mark and his team were not moving fast enough to embrace ai.

Um, I Would say they had a lot of AI initiatives, and they had this kind of notion of agents and trying to stitch together something that looked like a common UI across all these things. And it was an, an ambitious effort. But it also seems to me, and it's really hard to do that across a bunch of code That you, they're so disparate and, and they're also disparate things.

They don't all kind of fit in like that. But if you look at who they appointed as the interim and the committee that they formed to, to run this thing until, I guess they bring in somewhat very sales oriented, very revenue ated. And, um, I mean, I don't wanna talk outta school, but I, I think that's where their focus is going to be, is, you know, increasing revenue and then also perhaps shedding some assets or some, you know, pieces that don't fit into this AI world going forward that don't, aren't core to the mission.

You know, these are the kinds of things you start hearing. Um, they reported their financial results. Not terrible.

Um, I mean, open, I look, I, I happen to think OpenText is a solid company. I like them. I, I do think some of the buying spree over the last couple years was a bit of Black Friday shopping and just throwing stuff in the card.

'cause hey, it was a good price. You know, will I ever use it? I don't know.

But it was a good price. Um, so the, I, I think there is some of that. And I think also the board felt, wait, how long was Mark there?

Like 13 years or something? Right? I think they felt it was time for a change and they wanted to go in a fresh AI direction.

You know, Alan, it, it is multiple things happening here because they reported their financials and they actually were quite good. Um, their cloud revenue cloud bookings were up 32%. Revenues not so much, but that's an emerging part of their business.

And a, uh, they did a $300 million share buyback program alongside doing a, a dividend bump. But the fi, that wasn't the whole story. They've been, they've been seeing a degradation or a decline in their full year revenue, somewhere between six to 10%.

So while it's good, it's not pointed, you know, it's not on that upward arc, um, it's going the opposite direction. So there's financial incentive, there's discipline around portfolio, right? How do all these products fit together?

Or do we end up to selling to four different parts of the organization? And, you know, we have, we have trouble cross-selling them. Let's make sense.

Rationale, bringing these things together. So it looks like a platform. It is a platform, and it operates like, like a platform.

And shed the things that don't make sense necessarily to do. And back to what I was saying in the first segment, ai, it's, it is realigning. They have to innovate on ai.

They've done some good things, uh, to this point, and they've been doing it for a while, but they really have to double, triple, quadruple down on AI to stay in this race. Right. Alan, do you think they go private because it's a lot easier to re-engineer when you're private than when You're home?

Oh, I, you know what, I, no short answer. No, because, you know, to go private with the idea that you're gonna go back out public at some point, you know, Michael Dell could do stuff like that. I, I don't, I don't see OpenText doing that unless there was some big PE company involved who was gonna take them private, right?

I don't think they would do it absent that. And there're like seven and a half, seven, seven something billion market cap. So it's gonna have to be somewhere with deep pockets to Get Yeah, no, there's old Enough of that.

Yeah. There's gotta be a big PE in there who's gonna take it? And, and, and if a pe and if they do do that with a pe then it's Gordon Gecko type, right?

The sum of its parts greater than the whole green is good. I was, uh, full disclosure, I was part of the micro focus, micro focus transition into OpenText. And what I will say, what I saw within the company is there was a lot of talk about ai, but you didn't, you know, when you see trying to grab a bunch of different products, it's, it's not, it's too hard.

It's, it's too many systems to try to put together and grab, you know, and try to make some sort of AI strategy. So there were some good, um, AI companies that were part of that transition. But again, um, the focus beca, there wasn't a really, I think personally a good understanding on how to take what they had and go forward with ai.

It became more about, you know, keeping the products, um, maintaining the products that they brought, and then how did they grab these pieces of AI and all these different products. And, and it just, it, it really wasn't a good strategy personally. And so I, I think you'll start to see things sell law.

I, well, that's what I would do. I, I mean, you look, micro focus itself was a bit of a conglomerate, right? Brought into another conglomerate.

So there are, there are a lot of disparate pieces here, I'm not sure. And, and working with OpenText all these years, I don't even know all the pieces. I don't know if they know all the pieces, how it all fits in.

I don't think they do either. Because, because I mean, they really have some amazing products. Yes, they do.

Um, but at the end of the day, I just, I don't think you have somebody who understands all that's out there and then to bring it into a cohesive strategy. And again, you know, there are some things that you shouldn't have. I'm, I'm a big believer of getting rid of things.

Um, there's just some things that you just need to let go in order to move fast. And yeah. So we see you wanted delete old code blasphemy, I tell you all product and delete it and see who notices.

That's what we'll do. Still can't believe that. Alright, let's take a break here on Textron Gang.

We're gonna come back and talk a little bit about China syndrome. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more.

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Home of security bloggers network. Hey, folks, we're back in the Trump administration is added again. This time we're gonna see folks in China who are using GPUs from Nvidia and a MD are gonna pay a 15% increase.

I guess they're paying that, or I guess maybe a MD and Nvidia will just passed that back to the government directly. But the United States taxpayer is gonna be the beneficiary of all this. And I have a lot of questions about how all this might play out, but Chris, from your side, um, as a quote unquote American, um, do you look at this and say, um, well, does this just mean that there's gonna be more demand for those GPUs outta China and the overall cost of those GPUs is probably gonna be higher anyway, so we're all gonna pay more for these GPUs.

So why wouldn't everybody just salute and say, well, this is great for Nvidia and a MD. Is there anything else to say more than that? I don't know.

I mean, it, it, yeah, you, you, you've, you've taken all of all my points. Yeah. I don't see the sense in this.

I don't see it achieving any of the goals necessary. Um, yeah, the best I can do is, is, so tomorrow, um, I'm on a panel on Salt Typhoon with, uh, CS two ai, Derek Har in that crowd. And I, I, looking at it, what I gonna say about that, and I think it plays to this, right?

So Salt Typhoon is really not familiar as this Microsoft name for this. You know, like if you read the articles, there's new Chinese, you know, uh, attack against infrastructure, but it's not, it's the accumulation of 30 years between the difference between what, what people like me and Kate, you may say in our premise, you know, in the most extreme security people, it's the difference between that and what we've actually done. It's just gap.

And China has just inhabited that and just, you know, and it's not any one thing. It's millions of little log files that are slightly changed, little configuration slightly changed. So we take AI and put it into that.

And my summation is that the Chinese government right now could play our infrastructure like an orchestra, like literally just, uh, you could literally, you know, take play Chi chi, uh, I can play, but like, can say it, right? Uhhuh and, and it's, uh, so yeah, we just dive into this sort of GPU war thing. I don't know.

I mean, that's, does that make any bloody difference other than, you know, moving some money around to places that I think aren't really great places without money? No. So, Mike, I, I've got a few things to say on this one.

There's a lot to unpack here. First of all, you said John and Susie q taxpayer are gonna be the beneficiary of this. I didn't see anything about where this money's going and where it's going to be spent on.

We don't know. Is this going into some slush fund to pay to stop illegal immigration? Is this Iran contra to, is this, who the heck knows where this money's going for to, or, or what it's gonna be used for?

We're we're using it to demolish the rose garden. Didn't you hear? Well, No, that's already paid for by private donations on the East Wing.

But, but here's the issue. And I wrote, I wrote the, one of the articles cited here. You can't talk outta one side of your mouth and say, we can't send this technology to China.

It's, it's strategically important. We cannot send this stuff to China. We gotta put in controls.

We can't, we're gonna sanction any country that plays like man in the middle forwarding this technology to China, and then all of a sudden say, oh, wait a second. Did you say 15%? You could have it?

Hey, I wanna buy a nuclear bomb. I'll give you 25. Yeah.

Can I get, can I get a missile? That's, And, and per and personally, Alan, when I read your article, I'm not just saying this, I thought you're spot on. Absolutely.

100%. It's, I personally, and, and Chris, I, I mean, I unders, I I really, it to me, I feel like we've just given the Chinese the advantage and well, we've Proven what we are. It's just a question of the price.

Yeah. I mean, it's not just the Chinese when Russia offers, right, Right. Or, or someone else.

Or, we're not for sale. We're not for sale. We're not for sale.

Well, Alaska might be up for sale. Well, we, we bought it once, let's not sell it back. His meeting was, we worked for sales, I think is what you meant.

But, but here's the other issue, guys. The other issue is just from a separation of, of church and state, and I'm not talking about church per se, but the US government is not a shareholder and partner in private companies. You know, I, I, I, I'm a, I, I'll have to admit, I'm a political science major.

I went to college a long time ago. One of the things they taught us about what was the difference between socialism, capitalism, fascism, and fascism and socialism, which of course is including in communism, the government controls the means of production, right? And capitalism, private companies control the means of production when the US and, and that's my bigger problem here.

It, it's, it's the problem with calling for the firing of Intel's, CEO and everything else, when the government is heavily handed, be in the operations day to day of private companies, you wind up with Putin's Russia, you wind up with the, that's one model you wind up with the Chinese Communist Party being the, the big brother of the Chinese capitalist system, if you want to call it a capitalist system. That's another model. Neither one of those models are anything that resembles what America is or was.

Right. And Alan, I, I totally agree. I, I mean, this is, I think one of, I mean, if we're not sounding the alarm about this, I, I, I was not a political science major, but I am so concerned about, you know, the government getting involved in e especially in business, that they don't understand.

I mean, quite frankly, who want, you know, who understands, uh, there's, you know, we keep throwing tech people, and I think one of the failures personally is that we are putting people in place that don't really understand the technology. And it's like, well, it's, it's a big deal. So the silliest argument that I've heard about all of this so far is that when you listen to the Chipmaker say, well, we need to sell these chips to China.

'cause otherwise they'll just go out and reverse the engineer them, build them themselves. They're going To anyway, And they're already going out to build them themselves. They're, they're going to anyway.

But let me, let me give you a more sane counter argument. And it comes from Mark Cuban, right? Mark Cuban came out and said, Hey, what are you guys upset about?

We just did what we've been trying to do for a very long time. We increased the corporate tax rate by 15%, right? Yeah.

So if we start charging all of these, so it's almost like a reverse tariff. We don't charge you to, as a foreign company, to bring in products to us. We're going to charge you an export tax to bring products to them.

Now, in this case, it's very selective, but if you took that at a broader level and just added, any American technology gets a 10 or a 15% tax added to it, and that money does go into the general treasury and not the Donald Trump Presidential library. Um, you know, mark Cuban says, that's not a bad thing. So, No, Alan, though, I, I think the mistake that we make, and I'm not, I'm trying to say, I'm trying not to say that just to be critical of Trump, but we, we want to impart on him, uh, political ideology.

He does not have a political ideology. He is a deal maker. He will sell it.

Hey, I'd like, I'd like to sell you this table. Remember interviewing salespeople? Yeah, no.

Sell me table. Should we sell me the pen? The pen?

If I, if you'll buy that pen, I'll sell it to you. Right? Right.

And, and you combine that with nationalism of, that's really in populism. That's really, if anything aligns with some kind of an ideology, you know, the right terms better than I do from political science. But I, so I think, you know, it's like anthropomorphizing uh, robots and humans.

It's like, we're putting on this, what's his, why doesn't he, why does he do this? It doesn't fit our ideologies. 'cause he doesn't have one.

So, I mean, there are maybe a few advantages if I try to put lipstick on the pig, is, well, at least China's paying the, uh, the 15% directly instead of us paying the tariffs and into our coffers. Where that money goes is probably into the Republican National Committee or some damn place like that. Who knows where it goes.

But I, I think we, we live in a world where there's not one model of what he's doing. He's doing every model that he think he can spin. And we'll see what comes out with, with Russia.

You know, Russia may be making chips as of Friday afternoon for all we know. And I, I'll, I'll go for a, a pig lipstick on this one. Right?

So to be clear, this, this is, this is all incredibly stupid and bad for actual security and national security and everything else. However, um, as a security person and as an American, I think both of those are true. You know, I have lived my entire life saying, okay, right now, and you see my boats, right?

You know, I'm not getting the storms. You're never gonna get all the perfect things. You work it out.

And this is an exercise of what, you know, whether our system can survive. You know, aggressive, intentional incompetence is the wrong word. You know what, what if our government did the exact opposite of everything we did?

If we can still survive, that really proves our point. Right? And this, Kate, to your point about the, you know, yeah.

So the whole GPU salt typhoon thing, this absolutely plays into China's favor. Let me say that in public, nothing here is good for us national security at all. But I didn't assume that China wasn't gonna be able to get GPUs in the first place.

Right? I think there is ways to address salt typhoon, and they don't actually require any government support or a lot of money. So if this, if nothing else, this forces us to evolve into the available cracks, which in this case, I think are the right ones.

But for stupid reasons, I mean, to be clear, it's not, this is not, this is not smart Political. I don't see how a 10 per 10 to 15% increase on the cost of US products overseas is good for business because ultimately it will drive people not to buy our stuff. Well, No, it incense them to reverse engineer it, Right?

Yeah. And that's what they do very well. Yes.

Mm-hmm. But, you know, it shouldn't be lost on us that the week before this was announced, Jensen Wong was in the White House having a private one-on-one with Trump, and I'm sure they cooked this up, and Donald said, cut us in on a piece of the action, and I'll let it happen. I'll call my people and make it happen.

This is, this is like going down to the Bergen Hunt and Social Club in Little Italy and, and making deals. Well, we, you know, we are, we, we do have kind of in our, we're involved in these companies now. Just take the US steel sale that occurred.

Yeah. We have a golden share in that way. And one share, which is basically veto on any decision we don't like.

It's not a financial Share. It's, it's, but it's control. It's socialism or fascism, both sides of the spectrum.

It it's government control of the means of production. Exactly. So it could say, I don't like that deal you're doing with whoever, or I want you to favor this company or this country over that one.

So what are you gonna do? You're gonna follow nice, nice GPU business. You got there.

It's shame if something happened to it. Yeah. I'm telling you, like, I'd like your blessing to sell this olive oil.

All right. Uh, that's all I'm gonna say. I'm glad no one raised their voice here, and we, we remain calm in discussing it.

And I will tell you the truth though, with everything that goes on, I wonder why people are not in the streets more. Yeah, I agree. It is what it is.

Well, I, I, I think that's because, you know, the other situations that's going on in the world, it's August and all the criminals are like, well, they're only gonna be here for 30 days. We're on vacation. We'll see you guys in September.

Could be. And it's really hot out there right now. Yes, it is.

Ask the National Guard troops patrolling DC Yeah. But all right, let, let's not go there. Hey, this has been a great text on gang, Kate, Chris, Mitch, Mike, thanks for joining.

Thank you for watching. As usual, we have a whole bunch of good, uh, Textron TV content behind this, including some of our Black hat coverage from last week. So check that out.

We did some really nice interviews on the show floor there, so check that out. We'll be back tomorrow with more gang and more good discussion. Until then, everyone have a great day.

This Alan Hummel. We're out.